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What could there be besides the end?
Even as Yuu watched the demons perform as they always did, he could not
help but wonder.
Or was it hope?
For amongst even the rotten, amongst even the fiends, there is such
weariness. There is such a cost to so endlessly desire, to scratch and
snarl and crave. Rapaciously, had Yuu chased his desires, his wish the
wish of every thing once it has tasted vigor and verve: immortality. The
want to live forever. To some, the idea was just a dream, a figment, a
twist of some playful imagination. Ha, they would scoff: you can't live
forever — 'tis a myth! But such secrets these fools do not see. For
though a man may waste his life chasing but a trail of smoke, if he ever
finds the fire oh, how the world will burn.
Onward, did the savages dance, dancing their brutal ballet, their angry,
hateful leap. They had no will of their own beneath the reign of the
melody, had no rights beneath the contract of their imprisonment. Thus
danced on they did, barbaric in their despise, and ferocious in their
display of it.
The poor boy had been just that: a boy. He'd held no chance, no flicker
of hope's bright burning candle. Extinguished, he was now. His blood
splashed along the dirt, drying in dark, brown clumps. The melody played
on. The cords of the koto vibrated in the silence of death, lingering only
the sonorous of sounds to carry, as wind does the carrion smell, astride
the air.
Yuu's hands ceased moving, and the koto's strings came to rest. The
devils stopped dancing, swaying in their servile way. A snarl lit Yuu's
lips as he watched the dumbfounded beasts lurch from side to side, utterly
obsequious. What was the point of being if not to be? Why did these beasts
live if only to serve? What of himself could be said as much? With
disgust, Yuu slams his hands down upon his koto, and with such force, such
aggression does he do so, that the strings of the instrument - so delicate
in sound, and so fragile so taut - snap, whipping away from the wooden
base. Yuu is aghast. He had not known the Demon Instrument could be
broken. How ardently he had tried in the past, to smash it upon the rock,
or crush it beneath the waves, to strangle the very life from this
inanimate thing, that it may bind him no longer to his inescapable fate.
But such is fate itself: that which is, which was, and which will be.
But here! Here, had it broken, had it snapped, and whined, and thrust
itself so far away. Was this to be freedom? Was this to be finally it?
In his absence of consciousness, in his forfeit of attention, Yuu failed
to notice: the demons no longer swayed. They were twitching now:
shuddering, jerking, trembling. Soon, their movements become more fluid,
less constrained. Their hands open and close, their tremendous fingers
clutching palms. Their necks wind, this way and that, turning to gaze,
from side to side, around the room. Their legs follow suit, their first
stumbling steps becoming smooth slides of foot.
It is this sound, the sound of movement so soft, so foreign and new, that
Yuu sees. He watches, himself now trembling, as the behemoths climb the
stairs towards him. He is struck still as their breath rises, heating the
space around. He is motionless as their hulking fingers grasp him around
the throat, and the legs, and the arms. He feels the tug. And he wonders,
now, as never before, if what he has come to know, if the power which he
has so ardently sought, is to be truly is. He is now to wonder, as the
fiends rip him piece from piece, stretching his bones from his sockets, as
his skin comes apart like paper: is death but another beginning?